GABRIEL WAN

My work is all based on mountains. I’m very interested in the differences between Chinese landscape art and Western landscape art. I really hope to find a way that will combine these two artistic traditions together in my work.

My initial exploration was through watercolour, but then I started to learn how to do Chinese brush painting and the tricks of acrylic painting. It’s very useful to learn different kinds of mediums and to express landscape art using different materials.

Although I have many artistic influences, these four artists have inspired this collection of paintings. For Chinese brush painting, Guo Xi’s mountains have a bit of tilt to them, making the cliffs look more dangerous and powerful which I tried to incorporate into my work. Watercolourist William Russell Flint uses clear and transparent layers, giving his paintings a bright and fresh look. Acrylic painter Robert Genn inspired me to use a variety of bright colours, and he also shows lots of details for those who look at the picture from a distance. Finally, the work of Wu Guan Zhong, who studied in Paris, was the Chinese painter to combine the Western and Asian traditions. His art displays lots of flowing movement and also retains the simple lines and basic Chinese brush painting techniques such as “strike” and “C-stroke”. 

My biggest challenge was to learn how to do Chinese brush paintings properly and to learn how to use layers in acrylic paintings. One of my greatest joys was being able to collaborate with my father, creating a traditional brush painting scroll and my father added a classical Chinese poem in calligraphy. We also worked together on an oil painting over the course of 20 hours and I learned a lot with him by my side. Collaboration like this was both challenging and stimulating. 

I hope people will begin to love mountains and nature as much as I do after seeing my paintings and pay attention to those small things such as the formation of rocks, that they haven’t before.